Healing Through A Course In Miracles

1

INTRODUCTION

Ihave spent twenty years of my life learning from and teaching A Course in Miracles . It dropped into my hands after a year of formulating a request. I had been asking God to create a genuine course in self-discovery. I was tired of courses, workshops, techniques for reaching enlightenment, for working with gemstones, with energies, with doing, with not doing, with taking stuff, with not taking stuff, with levels, with more or less transcendental meditations. I was sick of it and I said to myself: It can’t be so complicated; we’re the ones who make everything so complicated and so difficult. The ego is in everything. Getting to God has to be much easier.

Around that time, I was practicing naturopathy as a method for healing. A patient of mine traveled to Venezuela, and she brought me back a book from there as a present. She said, It was like an impulse; I walked into a bookstore and a force carried me to the shelf where this book was. I felt that it was for you, so here you are.

The book was A Course in Miracles. As soon as I took it in my hands, I knew for sure that God, the universe, was responding to my plea, as he had so many times before. I felt then that my spiritual quest had reached a level in which I could now rest, that what I needed to do was read the book and put it into practice.

I started with the Manual for Teachers, and then I knew that I now had the book, or the course, I had asked for. For a year I read it and made a summary of a hundred pages or so, made up of sentences that enlightened me when I read the Course. I said to myself: You have to teach it if you want to learn it. I did my exercises daily.

There was something that bothered me, and it bothered me a lot: specifically, it was the name of this book. In fact, when I started to teach it, I called it a course for self-discovery. That didn’t last long: a year later I was calling it "Workshop on A Course in Miracles."

I remember that in my first class, or workshop, two people showed up, and never came back. But every day there was someone new. By the end of the course —which lasted an academic year— there were twenty people. For a time, this served as a reference number: having this number of people interested was a precondition for giving A Course in Miracles workshop wherever they asked for one.

Twenty years have gone by. It has been a wonderful journey, of learning, of transformation: a journey in which you save time, a lot of time, and during which you realize that with the most famous spiritual practices you progress slowly, if we compare them to the application of the principles contained in the Course. It’s quite true when it says, I will save you a thousand years.

The miracle substitutes for learning that might have taken thousands of years.¹

I’ve held onto a paragraph from the Workbook for Students:

This course is a beginning, not an end. (...) No more specific lessons are assigned, for there is no more need of them. Henceforth, hear but the Voice for God... He will direct your efforts, telling you exactly what to do, how to direct your mind, and when to come to Him in silence, asking for His sure direction and His certain Word.²

Little by little, I applied the principles of the Course, I asked the Holy Spirit for guidance, and I began to forgive myself. The way seemed difficult, but I never found it to be difficult. What’s more, I considered it perfectly clear, with signposts to keep one from getting lost. I haven’t stopped practicing daily over these twenty years, during which I’ve probably given about a hundred courses.

I don’t consider myself a Course master, more like a fairly advanced student. My copy reveals how much I have worked with it: the letters on the cover have disappeared, and the pages are full of colors and underlining. When I have it in my hands, I feel a deep peace. Not because of the book, but because of all I have experienced with it.

Today I am asked to give courses all over and I can’t keep up with it. Once again, I put it in the hands of the Holy Spirit, and once again, I’ve been given the answer: "Give the Course on the Internet; I think it’s called Webbing." But you don’t just get the answer; the means come to you as well. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be fair. Currently there is a team of people working so that the Course can reach all parts of the world via the Internet.

The Course uses Judeo-Christian terminology. It talks about God, the Holy Spirit, the ego, sin, expiation, etcetera. At first, this bothered me because I had been raised under Catholic fundamentalism. Later, I came to understand that the words are only symbols and that it’s the concepts that need to change. When you change them, the words have a different meaning.

The Holy Spirit is our Higher Self, the one that is permanently connected to universal Source, or God. It must be made very clear that the Course teaches that everything is a dream and that we create the characters and the world itself. We are in a dream and we have to wake ourselves up, but always with help from the Holy Spirit. Don’t ask God to wake you from the dream; for God, it doesn’t exist. The body and the world were not created by God, but rather by the Son of God who felt separated from the Great Maker. In fact, the Bible foreshadows this somewhat when it says that Adam fell asleep because Adam is still asleep. Bible history is the dream of Adam and Eve.

The reader will see that the book is radical in many respects. But that’s because the Course is as well. It doesn’t enter into controversy; it simply states that everything is a dream, that the world doesn’t exist, nor the body either. There’s no compromise: you either take it or you leave it.

The dream world is the world of fear, of separation, of disease, of need, and of death. What genuine nonsense!

One of the teachings that I consider vital consists of healing perception. Perception is a body function and it belongs to the sphere of consciousness. It is what keeps us in the dream because it makes us believe that what we see is real, instead of understanding that it is just interpretations determined by our unconscious learning, beliefs, taboos, etcetera.

Projection makes perception.³ What is it that we project? Guilt. Guilt is the rock on which the ego has erected its church and what makes time continue to exist. That is why it is so important to apply forgiveness continuously in our lives.

This book only seeks to make the reader more conscious that the healing of our ills lies in our minds and that the Course is a resource for healing here on Earth.

This book is organized according to the same method I use when I teach and learn A Course in Miracles in my workshops. The teaching is reiterative; you can never repeat the principles of ACIM enough. I try to bring these principles to daily life to help the people who listen to me or who train with me to make the pertinent change in mentality, always under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

The change always has to be one of mentality, not of behavior. Behavioral changes don’t lead anywhere.

True learning is constant, and so vital in its power for change that a Son of God can recognize his power in one instant and change the world in the next. That is because, by changing his mind, he has changed the most powerful device that was ever given him for change.⁴

In conclusion, I must say something very important: everything I explain about A Course in Miracles is my personal interpretation. I always ask the Holy Spirit for inspiration, but that doesn’t mean that what I say or write is endorsed by the Foundation for Inner Peace, who are the ones who have the rights to the book A Course in Miracles.

Many thanks to everyone.

Enric Corbera

2

THERE ARE TRUTHS THAT GO BEYOND ESTABLISHED TRUTHS

Deep truths are statements of which the opposite also contains a deep truth.

Niels Bohr¹

Many scientific theories today are obsolete and, nevertheless, they continue to be taught at schools and universities. Some, in their day, demonstrated something simply because the technology necessary for demonstrating its opposite was lacking. For example, the structure of the atom was considered rigid until it was demonstrated that the position of the electron is within a field of possibilities. In the same way, it is currently asserted that everything is separate and that the universe is not united by what was formerly called ether. In 1887, Michelson and Mosley declared that, if there really was something that connected everything, that something should have movement, which could be detected. Since they were unable to measure it in their experiments, they declared a profound truth: everything is separate.

This profound truth programmed many generations into a paradigm whose falseness is known today, which doesn’t stop many from continuing to live within it. This is due to the fact that established beliefs mark our form of thinking and of seeing the world.

More than a hundred years after Michelson and Mosley, in 1996, the experiment was repeated and the journal Nature published the results in an article titled Special Relativity. Movement was detected in the field.

There is an energy that unites everything called the field which many, including myself, call matrix.

Upon receiving the Nobel Prize in 1944, Max Planck said:

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force... We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.²

Our existence, our way of thinking and, therefore, in a certain sense of our way of creating are based on some premises or assumptions (profound truths) that today have been shown to be false.

It is reasonable for us to reflect on and reconsider our way of life. I think that the most intelligent thing a person can do is to question him or herself as often as possible. This will allow them to evolve in their thinking and to acquire profound truths that replace other completely opposite profound truths that have helped them to live.

We are standing before a great paradigm shift. Every day there are more minds who live and understand interconnectedness, who realize that our acts have repercussions on others and that absolutely everything we do affects the rest. At this moment, I am thinking of myself and how one decision has moved so many souls and has changed so many lives. I’m referring to a series of videos posted on the Internet. The idea arose without expectations, just a way of sharing, even to the point that I asked myself whether the videos would interest anyone. One year later, it turns out that there are thousands upon thousands of people who watch them. We receive about a hundred e-mails a day in which they ask us things with the intention of learning. E-mails from all over the world and invitations to give conferences and courses have arrived from the Amazon rain forest, from powerful groups, from highly respected individuals, etcetera. We have even received proposals for programs to aid the most underprivileged ethnic groups.

All of this has made me fully conscious that our acts always produce an effect somewhere. Today the Internet has a power to communicate that was impossible for us to imagine only a few years ago. Everything happens much more quickly; we live in the information age, but there is so much of it and the ideas can be so disparate that, instead of being informed, our mind finds itself immersed in nonsense.

That’s why it is essential to develop the capacity for discernment. To do so, we need to have a self-taught mind, one open to all sorts of thoughts and, above all, a mind capable of living in one truth today and exchanging it for another tomorrow because thought has evolved towards a deeper truth. I’m referring to activating our neuroplasticity, the capacity that allows us to learn and to change our life models.

We live under false assumptions that act as or have acted as profound truths:

ASSUMPTIONS ON WHICH DARWIN’S THEORY IS BASED:³

1.Life may arise spontaneously from nonliving material.

2.Nature doesn’t endow a species beyond what it needs to live.

3.Existing species may evolve into entirely new species slowly, over long periods of time.

These premises were completely accepted scientific truths, but today they have been replaced by other truer more up-to-date ones. What is really disturbing is that science moves forward, but the rhythm of change in classroom teaching is slower. Today, at universities, truths which science has declared obsolete are still being taught. Why?

There are several experiments that demonstrate the first premise especially:

The scientific attempt to create organic stuff from a soup of inorganic stuff in modern times inevitably brings to mind the landmark experiment of chemist and biologist Stanley Miller and Nobel Prize–winning physical chemist Harold Urey at the University of Chicago in 1952. The initial experiment was conducted using the elements and compounds that scientists in the mid-20th century believed made up Earth’s early atmosphere (water vapor, ammonia, hydrogen, and methane) and various forms of catalysts, like simulated lightning, to trigger the simplest beginnings of life.

While no living material resulted from the experiment, the study reported that five amino acids were present at the end. (...) this sounds like encouraging support for Darwin’s ideas...⁴

And Joan Oró, a Spanish biochemist and NASA consultant, made another discovery:

Using hydrocyanic acid under environmental conditions similar to the Earth’s hypothetical early atmosphere, adenine was obtained. This was the first time an organic nitrogen compound had been obtained via abiotic synthesis under conditions similar to those found on the Earth millions of years ago.⁵

Later on, it was discovered that the proposed atmospheric models were not very accurate. Something more is needed, something that science has not discovered, or if it has, it hasn’t formally reported it. Currently there are several scientists who speculate about the possibility that DNA comes from interstellar space. We would be creatures formed from stardust.

The second premise has also been called into question. One example is the evolution of the human brain. [O]ur brains became larger than they needed to be.⁶

In terms of the third assumption, it has been demonstrated that Neanderthal DNA is very different from our own, and this puts them in a different evolutionary tree from that of human beings. To date, there are no material remains of transitional species to support the evolution premise. All indicates, for example, that we did not descend from Homo neanderthalensis.⁷

The archeologists Avi Gofer, Ron Barkai and Israel Hershkovitz, from the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology at the University of Tel Aviv Medical School, found Homo sapiens remains, specifically teeth, from 400,000 years ago in Israel, when until not long ago the most ancient remains were from 200,000 years ago.

The eight teeth were found in the cave at Qessem, a prehistoric site east of Tel Aviv, and were analyzed by an international research team. According to the results of these studies, the teeth are very similar in size and shape to those of Homo sapiens.⁸ Today there is a scientific line of argument that leads us to consider an intelligent design (ID). Let’s examine its presumptions:

INTELLIGENT DESIGN ASSUMPTIONS:⁹

1.There is an order in the universe.

2.The complexities of living systems can best be explained by directed, rather than random, processes.

This theory is based on the idea that there must be a pattern to follow and that, therefore, behind it there is a plan or intelligence. The great mystery is about what type of intelligence we are dealing with; this is the question that flattens all the minds who seek the truth. Why do we live? Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Why so much effort if we’re going to die? Where is this colossal force headed?

Even Darwin himself in On the Origen of Species considered it unlikely that natural selection alone could be responsible for the enormous specialization of organs and tissues.¹⁰ Einstein himself said, I see a pattern but my imagination cannot picture the maker of the pattern... we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.¹¹ And Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA molecule, when asked about the possibility that life could have come from a random series of events, said:

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions that would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.¹²

The theory of natural selection and the survival of the fittest have carried us towards competitiveness and destruction. Nature teaches us that the primary force is COOPERATION, and it does so with a plethora of examples, such as that of the ant hill, which functions as a single organism. We must change our paradigm to one of cooperation and abandon the struggle to be the strongest, which has brought us to the current crisis. One of the solutions involves cooperativeness, the search for shared solutions. Human life shows unmistakable signs of an intelligent design. The evidence for it is found upon studying the infinite number of biological processes. We are complex beings. Natural processes are complex as well. This leads us to the thought that all manifest physiological processes presuppose the existence of an intelligent design. In Deep Truth, Gregg Braden offers us a very eloquent example: Twenty separate proteins must be present for our blood to clot and bleeding to stop. What makes this so interesting is that if even one of the proteins is absent, the clotting mechanism won’t work.¹³ And this leads me to deduce that the twenty proteins must be present before the blood is constituted, which demonstrates that there is a pattern underlying physical manifestation. This cannot be governed by evolution but rather by an intelligent design.

Our emotions influence the field, or matrix, in which we are immersed. Our whole world and our bodies are constituted by an energy field that